Jerry Meldon: The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa

The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa

Billy
Joya, security adviser to Honduras’s post-coup-d’etat
President Roberto Micheletti, offered the following
explanation for the armed forces’ June 28 insurrection
ousting democratically elected President Manuel
Zelaya:

Joya said Zelaya had been following the same
“Marxist-Leninist strategy” for tightening his grip on
power that Chilean President Salvador Allende had in 1973
when Gen. Augusto Pinochet toppled Allende.

At least, Joya
is right about this much: The assault on Honduras’s
fragile democracy was reminiscent of Pinochet’s
1973 putsch. But Joya’s justification says more about
where he and Micheletti are coming from than it does about
Zelaya, whose real offense was to run afoul of the Honduran
oligarchs.

The Organization of American States and United
Nations have condemned the coup and demanded Zelaya’s
reinstatement. But the Obama administration has been
characteristically cautious, expressing displeasure and
suspending military ties, but stopping short of economic
sanctions that might lead to some second thoughts among the
coup leaders.

Does the White House’s chariness reflect
fear that a reinstated Zelaya might take some revenge by
releasing records revealing Reagan-era CIA collaboration
with brutal Honduran generals and their drug kingpin
partners?

Does Obama prefer, as he does regarding George
W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, to never look backwards
even when the history involves serious crimes?

Pleasing
the Putschists

Obama's disinterest in history
would please Micheletti and his fellow putschists, not least
Billy Joya, who in the early 1980s was a captain in
Battalion 3-16, a brutal Honduran intelligence unit that was
trained and equipped by the CIA.

A 1995 Baltimore Sun
investigation of Reagan-era crimes documented the
battalion’s use of shock and suffocation devices and its
murder of 184 victims. The U.S. Embassy knew what was going
on, but continued to work closely with Battalion 3-16’s
leaders.

The CIA got into bed with homicidal uniformed
Hondurans because the Agency - Washington’s primary tool
for achieving goals antithetical to American values - has
always operated that way.

Indeed, the story of how
Nazi-like tactics spread across Latin America and other
parts of the world can be traced back to the days just after
World War II. Washington – in the name of “fighting
communism” – recruited fugitive Nazi war criminals like
SS Capt. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, France,
who escaped across so-called “rat lines” to South
America and helped organize right-wing intelligence
services.

In those years, the newly formed CIA embraced
not only ex-Nazis but their methods. Nazi war criminals
smuggled to South America taught Nazi torture techniques to
the region's intelligence services.

“Butcher of Lyon”
Barbie did it in Bolivia. SS Col. Walter Rauff, developer of
mobile gas vans and answerable for some 90,000 deaths during
World War II, did likewise in Chile for Gen. Augusto
Pinochet.

The Carter-Reagan
Divide

Breaking with this collaboration in the
late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter embargoed arms sales to
South America’s more flagrant human rights violators.
However, when Carter left the Oval Office, the old ways
returned with a vengeance under Ronald Reagan.

Even before
the 1980 election, members of the ruling elite in Guatemala
– where death squads had been operating with impunity for
decades – were confident that Reagan’s victory would
revive Washington’s holy war against communism.

They
were confident because two pillars of the American far
right, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, commander of U.S. forces in
South Korea until Carter sacked him for insubordination, and
retired Gen. Daniel Graham, a former senior official at the
CIA who advised the Reagan campaign, had assured them.

As
if to underscore the message, the Republicans invited
Guatemalan Mario Sandoval Alarcon, “Godfather” of
Central American death squads, to Reagan’s inaugural
ball.

In the years that followed Guatemala’s bloodbath
would get even bloodier where more than 100,000 would die.
Ditto for El Salvador, where some 75,000 lives would be
snuffed out as the CIA helped another right-wing military
crush peasant and labor uprisings.

In Nicaragua, the
Reagan administration would go on the offensive because
leftist Sandinista guerrillas had defeated the ruthless and
corrupt Somoza dynasty in 1979, some 43 years after
Washington had installed it.

Determined not to let
Nicaragua become another Cuba, the Reagan administration
went to work countering the revolution by reorganizing the
remnants of the Somoza dictatorship’s National Guard,
which was blamed for slaughtering some 50,000 Nicaraguans in
1978 and 1979.

In the early 1980s, Reagan hailed this
ragtag army as “freedom fighters.” To the rest of the
world, they were the “contras” and were widely regarded
as drug-tainted terrorists. (In a private conversation with senior CIA
officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, even Reagan accepted
some of that reality, calling the contras
“vandals.”)

Death-Squad
Veterans

Right-wing Argentine intelligence
units and the CIA began whipping the contras into shape in
Honduras, which had the misfortune of bordering Guatemala,
El Salvador and Nicaragua – the three hot spots for
Reagan’s determination to draw a line against leftist
gains in the region.

Honduras would trade in its
traditional “Banana Republic” moniker for “Pentagon
Republic.”

In establishing the contra operation, the CIA
collaborated with Argentine instructors whose prior work had
included organizing a “dirty war” that had tortured and
killed tens of thousands of dissidents in Argentina.

On
March 17, 1981, President Reagan hosted Gen. Roberto Viola
of Argentina, who was about to be sworn in as president.
Extending the general his best wishes, Reagan promised Viola
that he would lift the embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed
on U.S. arms sales to Buenos Aires.

Though Argentina’s
hand in training the contras is well known, its broader role
in the CIA’s Central America “counterinsurgency”
operations is not as well appreciated, nor is the price
Hondurans paid for the fact that the Honduran Army officers
with whom the CIA worked most closely made the murderous
Argentines their role models.

Initially, the
Argentine dirty warriors taught Honduran soldiers and the
contras how repression was handled in Buenos Aires,
including, torture, high-profile assassinations and
“disappearances,” the secret murder of political
targets.

According to J. Patrice McSherry, author of
Predatory States, “Some of the Argentine officers
involved were key Condor figures … Condor was extended to
Central America.”

What was Condor?

In
Operation Condor, South American intelligence teams joined
forces to operate across borders to kidnap and assassinate
their countries’ political exiles, essentially denying
them safe haven anywhere in the world.

That explained how
corpses of Bolivian refugees would turn up in Buenos Aires
garbage dumps in August 1974. One month later, in that same
city, a car bombing claimed the lives of Chilean Gen. Carlos
Prats and his wife. Prats had opposed the 1973 coup d’etat
led by Gen. Pinochet that overthrew Chile’s progressive
president, Salvador Allende.

Despite release of
historical documents about this right-wing international
terror campaign, the mainstream U.S. media has devoted
little attention to Operation Condor, in part it would seem
because of the background roles of respected American
leaders such as former CIA Director George H.W. Bush and
ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

A 1978 State
Department document, discovered by Prof. McSherry in 2001,
provides evidence that the U.S. government facilitated
communication among the intelligence chiefs who were
collaborating in Operation Condor.

In the document, a
cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert E. White to
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance says Washington’s link to
Condor might be exposed by an ongoing investigation into the
Sept. 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean foreign
minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni
Moffitt in broad daylight in Washington, D.C.

Letelier,
like Prats, had been an outspoken critic of Chilean
strongman Pinochet. And like Prats, Letelier was murdered in
a car bombing that Pinochet’s intelligence agency, DINA,
had assigned to Michael V. Townley, an American expatriate
closely linked to CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles and
European neo-fascist terrorists.

Notably, George
H.W. Bush was CIA director at the time of the Letelier
murder and Agency informants had attended a meeting three
months earlier at which the terror operations were
discussed. Bush then helped stonewall the ensuing FBI
investigation. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy
& Privilege.]

Disrupting the
Peace

Prior to the Argentines’ arrival in
Honduras, the country had enjoyed relative peace, isolated
from the violence across the country’s borders with
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Soon, however, the
Honduran police and armed forces would begin their own
murderous campaign against a tiny group of domestic
guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers.

In
1979, Honduran chief of police Amilcar Zelaya Rodriguez
formed the secret Grupo de los 14, a goon squad that
specialized in the disappearance and torture of state
enemies. After President Reagan and Vice President Bush took
office in 1981, the violence in Honduras escalated.

Gen.
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez assumed control of Grupo de los 14.
In Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How
Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have
Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League, Scott and
Jon Lee Anderson characterized the Honduran officer as
follows:

“General Alvarez did not invent Honduran
paramilitary squads, but he was the man who streamlined
them, integrated them into the armed forces, and allowed
them to conduct a dirty war.”

A vitriolic anticommunist
who graduated from Argentina’s Colegio Militar in 1961,
Alvarez would maintain contact with his instructors there,
most notably Jorge Rafael Videla, who would head the
Argentine junta during the Argentine dirty war’s bloodiest
period.

In addition, Alvarez received advanced training at
Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Fort
Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, where he attended the
School of the Americas, known to critics as the “School of
the Assassins.”

With his ambition, ruthlessness and
sleaziness, Alvarez was just the man the CIA was looking
for. Alvarez had Grupo de los 14’s members undergo
counterinsurgency training by U.S., Argentine and Chilean
instructors. The group expanded over time and was renamed
Batallion 3-16.

One of the group’s instructors, Ciga
Correa, had been a member of the Argentine Anti-Communist
Alliance (“Triple-A”), a death squad that operated on
the front lines of Argentina’s dirty war. One of his
Triple-A missions was the 1974 Operation Condor
assassination of Gen. Prats.

In an offshoot of Operation
Condor, Correa joined an Argentine unit in Guatemala City
that targeted suspected Argentine guerrillas who had fled to
Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Under the tutelage
of Correa and his associates, Alvarez’s thugs kidnapped,
tortured, murdered and “disappeared” Honduran guerrillas
and their supporters, whose numbers had swelled following
the Sandinista triumph next door in Nicaragua.

Flash
Forward to 2001

In 2001, Society of Helpers
Sister Laetitia Bordes read that President George W. Bush
planned to nominate John D. Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations. At the time, she recalled a
face-to-face meeting in 1982 with Negroponte in his office
as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

She had made the journey
to ask a nagging question: What had happened to 32 women who
had fled to Honduras to escape El Salvador’s death squads
in the months following the March 24, 1980, assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador?Sometime after arriving in Honduras, the women had
been forcibly taken from their living quarters and shoved
into vans, never to be seen again. Negroponte, who had
worked closely with Gen. Alvarez, dissembled, disavowing
knowledge of the women’s whereabouts and insisting that
the U.S. Embassy kept its hands out of Honduran government
affairs.

Twelve years after that encounter, Sister
Laetitia realized that Negroponte had lied to her. She read
a Honduran Human Rights Commission report on the torture and
disappearance of political prisoners. It specifically
mentioned Negroponte’s complicity in human rights
violations.

In 1996, Sister Laetitia read a Baltimore Sun
interview with Jack Binns, Negroponte’s predecessor in
Tegucigalpa. Binns recalled that a group of Salvadorans,
including the women about whose whereabouts Sister Laetitia
had inquired, had been captured on April 22, 1981, tortured
by members of the Honduran Secret Police, placed aboard
Salvadoran military helicopters and, after taking off,
thrown out of the helicopters.

Binns added that U.S.
authorities had been informed about the incident.

The
Honduran government eventually recognized 184 disappearances
in that era: 39 Nicaraguans, 28 Salvadorans, five Costa
Ricans, four Guatemalans, one American, one Ecuadoran, one
Venezuelan and 105 Hondurans. Human rights organizations
believe the numbers were considerably higher.

(Ultimately,
President George W. Bush selected Negroponte for a string of
important assignments: U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, the nation’s first
“Intelligence Czar” and, finally, in 2007, Deputy
Secretary of State.)

Military Turmoil

In
early 1982, Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova
promoted Negroponte’s sidekick, Grupo de los 14 leader
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, to the rank of general. Before the
year was over, Alvarez had decimated Honduras’s tiny
guerrilla movement and was promoted to Commander in Chief of
the Armed Forces.

The appointment bred resentment in more
senior officers – and as Hondurans grew fed up with their
country’s exploitation by Washington as a base for the
Nicaraguan contras, the resentment among Gen. Alvarez’s
enemies grew.

The boil burst in March 1984, when
HonduranAir Force commander Gen. Walter Lopez Reyes
spearheaded an internal military coup that drove Alvarez
into exile in the United States. The violence in Honduras
soon tapered off.

CIA Tegucigalpa station chief Donald
Winters, who had asked Alvarez to be the godfather to his
adopted daughter, was reassigned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the
contras – a brutal and ineffective fighting force – were
becoming a headache for the White House. Reports of the CIA
mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and a CIA training manual
that sanctioned the assassination of civilians undermined
support for Ronald Reagan’s Central American proxy
wars.

Anticipating congressional cutoff of funding for the
contras, the White House convened a National Security
Planning Group meeting on June 25, 1984. The meeting was
marked by heated debate about whether seeking third-country
support for the contras would expose President Reagan to
impeachment.

Vice President Bush asserted that soliciting
the contra aid would be lawful unless the United States
promised to give the third parties something in return.
Nonetheless, Reagan personally approved, with Bush’s
active involvement, special aid for Honduras as an implicit
quid pro quo for helping the contras.

According to the
minutes of a Feb. 7, 1985, meeting of high-level Reagan
administration officials, which were released at the later
trial of Reagan’s point man for the contras, Lt. Col.
Oliver North, the “principals agreed … to provide
several enticements in exchange for … continued support”
of the contras.

Twelve days after the meeting,
Reagan released millions of dollars in economic aid to
Honduras.

The Drug Connection

The Reagan
administration also did what it could to protect its
Honduran friends who ran afoul of the law.

On Nov. 1,
1984, the FBI arrested eight men in Miami and charged them
with plotting to overthrow the Honduran government and
assassinate President Suazo. The alleged aim of the scheme,
which was financed by $40 million in cocaine profits, was to
reinstate Gen. Alvarez as Chairman of Honduras’s Joint
Chiefs of Staff.

The Honduran government asked
Washington to hand over Alvarez, but he remained safe within
U.S. borders, even benefiting from a $50,000 Pentagon
contract for a six-month study of “low-intensity
conflict” in Central America.

Alvarez also
reportedly spent time as the house guest in Miami of
international arms trader Gerard Latchinian, one of the
richest men in Honduras, where he was known as the
“ambassador of death.” Latchinian got 30 years in prison
for his role in the drug-financed coup/assassination
plot.

What made the stench even worse was Washington’s
treatment of Alvarez’s chum, Gen. Jose Bueso-Rosa. Bueso
had served as Army Chief of Staff and was an avid supporter
of the contras until Alvarez’s March 1984 ouster –
following which Bueso was demoted to military attaché in
Santiago, Chile.

For his role in the assassination plot,
Bueso turned himself in to federal authorities in Miami. In
June 1986, he pleaded guilty to two federal counts of
“traveling in furtherance of a conspiracy to plan an
assassination” and was sentenced to five years at a
minimum security prison.

The light sentence must have been
related to Oliver North’s appeals to State and Justice
Department officials for intervention on Bueso’s behalf.
Two U.S. government officials, one serving and one retired,
testified as character witnesses at Bueso’s sentencing
hearing, and the Reagan administration submitted an appeal
for leniency that read in part:

“General Bueso-Rosa has
always been a valuable ally to the United States. As chief
of staff of Honduras’s armed forces he immeasurably
furthered U.S. national interests in Central America. He is
primarily responsible for the initial success of the
American military preserve in Honduras. For this service he
was awarded the Legion of Merit by the President of the
United States, the highest award that can be presented to a
foreign military officer.” [See Scott and Marshall’s
Cocaine Politics.]

Reagan also had awarded the
Legion of Merit to Gen. Alvarez.

‘Lenient’
Sentence

The presiding judge decided that the
additional information trumped the Justice Department’s
description of the assassination conspiracy as “the most
significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.” A
senior Justice Department official called the five-year
sentence meted out to Bueso “lenient.”

But it wasn’t
lenient enough for Oliver North. As authors Peter Dale Scott
and Jonathan Marshall reported, North sent a note to his
then boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, saying
there remained one “problem.”

The general was
the man with whom North and three other senior U.S.
officials had “worked out arrangements” for contra
support, and Bueso had entered a guilty plea on the
assumption that he would be given time at a minimum security
prison “for a short period [days or weeks] and then walk
free.”

“Our major concern,” North wrote, “is that
when Bueso finds out what is really happening to him, he
will break his longstanding silence about the [contras} and
other sensitive operations.” [Emphasis
added.]

North and some of his colleagues were therefore
going to “cabal quietly … to look into options: pardon,
clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to
keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process
and start spilling the beans.”

Poindexter reassured
North: “You may advise all concerned that the President
will want to be as helpful as possible to settle this
matter.” In the end, the Justice Department blocked
clemency or deportation, and Bueso-Rosa served his time and
kept his mouth shut.

But the late 1984 timing of
Bueso’s drug-financed assassination plot suggests that it
may have been one of those other sensitive operations
that Oliver North cagily referred to in his note to
Poindexter. The Honduran general’s drug/assassination
conspiracy may have been part of the Reagan
administration’s elaborate plans to sustain the
contras.

A revitalized Honduran connection would
have guaranteed Tegucigalpa's crucial support. The coup’s
failure led to Plan B: economic leverage with President
Suazo. And because a congressional ban on aiding the
contras, known as the Boland Amendment, made that
impeachable, it became a top priority to conceal Reagan’s
and Bush’s roles.

The Bush family name was further
protected by President George H.W. Bush’s Christmas Eve
1992 pardons to six key Iran-Contra defendants, including
former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. To save his own
skin, Weinberger was expected to incriminate Bush in the
Iran-Contra cover-up.

Bill Clinton’s opposition to the
Iran-Contra investigation when he assumed the presidency in
1993 also helped spare Bush from having to answer a new
round of questions from special prosecutor Lawrence E.
Walsh.

Walsh’s truncated investigation had touched on
– but failed to pursue – the contra-cocaine aspect of
the Iran-Contra Affair, of which the Bueso-Rosa/Latchinian
conspiracy was just the tip of a narcotics-filled
iceberg.

Consortiumnews.com’s Robert Parry, the late
Gary Webb and others – with no help, indeed with
resistance from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times – have painstakingly established that the
contras were the beneficiaries of and in some cases in
cahoots with drug traffickers. [For details, see Parry’s
Lost History.]

Digging
Deeper

So let’s delve a bit further into the
Honduran Connection.

A 1983 US Customs report noted
that the Honduran cargo firm SETCO Air was headed by Juan
Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Class I DEA violator in
partnership with “American businessmen who are …
smuggling narcotics into the United States.”

Six years
later, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics
and International Operations, headed by John Kerry,
D-Massachusetts, issued a multi-volume report, “Drugs, Law
Enforcement and Foreign Policy.”

The report noted, among
other sensational findings, that SETCO Air was “the
principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to
transport supplies and personnel for the FDN [Nicaraguan
Democratic Force], carrying at least a million rounds of
ammunition, food, uniforms and other military supplies for
the Contras from 1983 to 1985.”

In other words, unfazed
by the 1983 Customs report that had identified Matta
Ballestero as a Class I violator – which meant drug
kingpin, top of the food chain – the Reagan administration
retained his airline for another two years as the contra’s
chief mover of supplies.

Yet what makes Matta’s case
special is just how far Washington would go to keep him in
business. In 1970, Matta marked himself as a big-time
trafficker when he was arrested at Dulles Airport outside
Washington for importing 54 pounds of cocaine. But he was
sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison,
and a year later he tiptoed out the door and didn’t come
back.

By 1973, the DEA considered Matta important enough
to entrap in a sting operation. But either the narcs blew it
or someone told them not to try.

Two years later, the DEA
learned that Matta had teamed up with Mexican drug kingpin
Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a tonnage supplier to El Norte
with Colombian and Peruvian connections. The partnership
would make Matta a billionaire.

A 1978 DEA intelligence
report cited by James Mills in his penetrating study, The
Underground Empire, noted that Matta had financed a
coup d’etat in his native Honduras that was led by
his partner, Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Transfer
Point

Even before that coup, Honduras had been
the transfer point for half a billion dollars worth of
northbound drugs. In the three years following the coup,
Matta Ballesteros and President Paz Garcia made Honduras an
even bigger cocaine trafficking center.

As Scott and
Marshall note in Cocaine Politics, when these events
unfolded, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and it was
his administration that overlooked Matta
Ballesteros’s behind-the-scenes role in Honduran
politics.

However, unlike the Carter administration, the
incoming Reagan team didn’t simply turn a blind eye. It
found Honduras’s corruption an ideal environment for
nourishing the contra war.

Matta’s number one Honduran
government enabler after President Paz was Col. Leonidas
Torres Arias, the head of military intelligence and a key
figure in making the necessary arrangements for opening
contra training camps.

A tripartite agreement emerged for waging the
contra war on Nicaragua. Argentine intelligence would handle
organization, administration and training; the CIA would
supply the funds; and Honduras would provide the territory
for operational bases.

At the time, Davico was second in
command of Argentine Army Intelligence and a graduate of the
U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. He would soon relocate
to Honduras to teach Alvarez’s Batallion 3-16 the
Argentine “dirty war” techniques of arbitrary detention,
torture, extrajudicial executions and disposal of
cadavers.

All three Hondurans – Torres Arias, Alvarez
Martinez and Paz Garcia – were considered to be in the
pockets of the drug lords. As Scott and Marshall put it:
“The CIA relied totally on the cocaine-trafficking
military in Honduras to back its plans to overthrow the
Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.”

But concerns about drug
trafficking did little to dissuade the Reagan administration
from teaming up with the Honduran military. That, however,
meant that the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration would
be operating at cross purposes.

The DEA agent in charge of
its recently opened Tegucigalpa office, Thomas Zepeda, had
documented the complicity of Col. Torres Arias and other
high-ranking Honduran officers in Matta Ballesteros’s drug
operations.

But DEA needed the Honduran military’s
assistance to arrest Torres and his cronies, and the CIA
needed them to support the contras. To avoid a showdown with
the CIA, the DEA’s Zepeda proposed that a grand jury be
empanelled to investigate corruption in the Honduran armed
forces.

But the CIA nixed the idea, no doubt to protect
its collaborators. As one high-level diplomat later noted:
“Without the support of the Honduran military there would
have been no such thing as the contras. It’s that simple
… So they got rid of the DEA station.”

The DEA
Tegucigalpa station was shut down - in June 1983, just as
the CIA station was doubling in size - in a naked move to
preclude a serious drug investigation. That same month,
Customs asked Zepeda to investigate Matta’s airline,
SETCO, which would soon be flying supplies to the
contras.

Brutal Murder

But the worst was
still to come. Shortly after noon on Feb. 7, 1985, DEA
undercover agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena walked out of the
U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico for a lunch date with
his wife.

Two Jalisco state policemen, two hired killers
and a drug lord’s lieutenant drove up alongside, told
Camarena “the commandante wants to see you,” and
shoved him into their car. They sped to a house that was
owned by drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero.

Camarena was
questioned and tortured there for the next 30 hours. His
interrogator, a captured tape would reveal, was a commander
in the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Mexico’s FBI.
One month later, Camarena’s mutilated body was discovered
next to that of his Mexican pilot.

First it was
assumed that the motive for the murders had been raids
Camarena had led on vast marijuana plantations, which had
cost Cara Quintero and his partners an estimated $5 billion.
But the interrogation, it turned out, focused on what
Camarena knew about corruption in Mexico’s political
hierarchy.

That would explain why the men who
attended the meeting at which Camarena’s abduction
reportedly included future Mexico City police chief Javier
Garcia Paniagua, and Manuel Ibarra Herrera, the former head
of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police.

That same year,
Newsweek would describe another attendee as the “boss of
bosses of Mexico’s cocaine industry,” a man whose
organization was believed to supply “perhaps one third of
all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”

A DEA
agent described the man as “the kind of individual who
would be a decision maker of last resort. He is at the same
level as the rulers of Medellin and Cali cartels.” That
man was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and at the planning
meeting he reportedly announced “we will soon have the
identity” of the DEA agent and he will be
silenced.

Matta Ballesteros kept his promise. Camarena was
silenced. The method, a forensic specialist determined, was
the application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to the
skull.

Hair sample analysis would establish Matta’s
presence at the silencing. But it was only in 1990 that
federal prosecutors in Los Angeles would finally put Matta
away for life for cocaine trafficking, racketeering and
conspiracy.

Significantly, a witness in
the Camarena murder case told the DEA that the CIA had
trained Nicaraguan contras on a ranch near Veracruz that was
owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, the same drug kingpin who
owned the house outside Guadalajara where Enrique Camarena
was murdered.

Matta would be arrested in 1986 in Colombia.
But he bought his way out of jail with a $2 million bribe
and made his way back home to Honduras. That same year,
which was three years after Customs had identified Matta as
both a Class I DEA violator and the owner of SETCO Air –
and after Matta had become a prime suspect in the
Camarena murder - the State Department renewed SETCO’s
contract to supply the contras.

For two more years Matta
would live in luxury in Hondruas, seemingly unconcerned by
any prospect of arrest since he still had many friends in
high places. His generosity would endear him with
Honduras’s abjectly poor masses. They called him
Honduras’s “Robin Hood.”

But in March 1988, after
the Iran-Contra scandal had devastated political support for
the contra war in Washington, a truce was declared in
Nicaragua. That eliminated Washington’s use for Honduras,
and its need for drug kingpins like Matta and his partner,
Mexican drug kingpin Felix Gallardo, who once told a DEA
informant that he was “protected” because his drug
profits were bankrolling the contras.

Only then were Felix
Gallardo and Matta Ballesteros arrested and flown to the
United States.

Belated Probe

When CIA
Inspector General Frederick Hitz belatedly investigated the
contra-cocaine connection in the late 1990s, he documented
the depth of CIA knowledge of drug traffickers and
money-launderers connected to the contra war – and
explained the key reason for protecting these
criminals.

According to Hitz’s report, the CIA had
“one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista
government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the
various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to
prevent effective implementation of the contra
program.”

One CIA field officer explained, “The focus
was to get the job done, get the support and win the
war.”

The CIA's manipulation of Honduran politics in
pursuit of that goal was another part of the contra war’s
legacy.

Besides the drug lords, other key players also ran
afoul of the law or met their own rough justice.

The
Argentine military junta self-imploded in the wake of the
disastrous 1982 war with Great Britain over the
Falklands/Malvinas islands, leading to a restoration of
civilian rule and a judgment by an Argentine court
denouncing the military government for genocide and other
crimes against humanity.

Reagan’s guest, Gen. Viola, was
sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Honduran Gen. Alvarez
Martinez returned to Honduras in 1987 and was silenced by an
assassin on Jan. 25, 1989.

The CIA's Clarridge was
indicted for perjury and lying to Congress in the
Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by President George
H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

But the ghosts of
Tegucigalpa continue to hover over Honduran politics. As
Hondurans protest the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya,
many believe that Washington encouraged and supported the
coup. Can anyone blame them?

They haven’t
forgotten that during the Reagan era, the CIA and Argentine
dirty warriors ran roughshod over their country. They
also know that Roberto Micheletti’s security adviser,
Billy Joya, was a member of one of those Reagan-era death
squads.

However badly
President Barack Obama may want to look forward not
backwards, Washington’s unacknowledged crimes of the past
few decades keep intruding on the
present.

*************

Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor
in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. He can be
contacted at jerry.meldon@tufts.edu. Dedicated
to the memory of Penny Lernoux.

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